Answer to the Oyneg Shabes Questionnaire

In 1940, historian Emanuel Ringelblum created a secret Warsaw ghetto archive, code-named Oyneg Shabes (“Joy of the Sabbath,” marking the day of the week in which the contributors met). He brought together a group of more than sixty people, secular and religious, from the political right and the left, to collect documents, artifacts, and photographs to record Jewish life under Nazi occupation and to ensure that posterity and future historians would understand the Jewish situation on the basis of their own, not German, sources. The Oyneg Shabes team issued questionnaires to different segments of the population to capture a full picture of the ghetto. When the physician Israel Milejkowski responded to his questionnaire, he reflected on the collapse of the medical infrastructure, decried the level of corruption and lack of compassion among ghetto dwellers, and explored the ethical issues of deciding cases of life or death.